Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday September 02, 2009 @10:53AM
from the new-and-shiny dept.

sv_libertarian writes "Mozilla recently updated its product roadmap through 2010. According to the first draft, the current browser will see a minor update in Q4 2009 and another in Q2 2010. Version 4.0 is headed for an October or November 2010 release and will bring a new user interface and browser sync integration. 'There is not much information on [what] this new user interface will look like, but the first mockups that have been posted on Mozilla's website suggest that the Mozilla team favors a Google Chrome-like design that integrates Windows 7 graphics features. Overall, window elements seem to be floating over the background.' The mockup page emphatically notes that the design is not final."

Why keep it the same across platforms? No, seriously, do you use Firefox on multiple platforms AND are you bothered by the differences in UI between the various Firefox'en? You'll live.

The interface should be native to the platform, adhering to the platform's UI standards. The binaries location and configuration location should adhere to the platform's application development standards. Adhere to standards, they are good for you. (Note; Experts only: deviate from standards when necessary)

Programs that use non-native, non-standard UI (Quicktime on Windows) are quickly (haha) reviled. And for good reason.

I am not so sure that users actually care that much about standards and fitting into each desktop at the end of the day. If you have a feature they want users will use your application no matter what it looks like. A nice Example is Google Chrome. By default they paint their own window handles/boarders on X11 pretty much guaranteeing that it wont fit into any desktop. This is a case where they are going directly against having a native standard control, actually putting in effort to break it in the name

I like having my Back, Forward, Reload, and Stop buttons left of the address bar. I can't believe they're considering adopting an IE-esque interface.

Their Chrome-like tab examples really fail, since they don't touch the top of the screen. That means not only are they not where you expected them to be, but you also can't click them by ramming your cursor to the top of the screen.

(This is a big one for me - I hate those X buttons that are in the top right, but are several pixels out, so that you actually have

But a pain in the ass for tech support people over the phone who need to check browser settings... "File ?.. I don't have anything that says file..".. And then there are the off flavors of Xp, which has different locations for network settings.. bastards.

Um, not to beat a dead horse into the ground, but Windows XP Explorer and Firefox 3 did this well. I don't know why Microsoft removed that ability. You could drag your buttons into the file menu and have the file menu + all the navigation buttons in Windows Explorer. Why is this so hard for MS/Mozilla to do again?

"Simple eh? Ask a room of people where mail merge is in Word and I bet 99% people that have used mail merge before have no idea. Is it in the Edit menu, the Formatting menu, or the Data menu (was there even a data menu?) This applies to most features.

Ask any UI expert and they'll tell you the Office Ribbon is the most important UI thing to happens since the GUI. If for any other reason is because the ribbon focused on task based UI instead of technical organization that didn't apply to your average user."

Just as a counterpoint, I decidedly don't like the tabs-on-top design, don't use Chrome in part because of that UI, and would probably switch to Opera if Firefox didn't make tabs-on-bottom an option.;-)

Tabs should be down the side. A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across, ergo, tabs and toolbars should be on the side where they are not using screen estate that can otherwise be used effectively for browsing.

Yes, I know Firefox does it with plugins, but I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...

The problem with tabs down the side is you either get (1) vertical text or (2) tabs that are as wide as they are above the window in which case the tab list takes up a HUGE proportion of the screen real estate, virtually all wasted unless you actually have a couple dozen tabs in one window to start eating up the available rows.

Neither of these options are very good IMO; I'd rather spend a few pixels of vertical height then have to read sideways text.

(Incidentally, this is why I never liked the taskbar on the side of the screen either. Maybe I should give it another shot with Windows 7 now that the taskbar is a little more icon-based and less word-based.)

Ugh, I hate UI elements that appear and disappear like that. I had the taskbar on auto-hide on my laptop (which only has a 1024x768 screen) and decided it wasn't even worth it there, even though that would have been present in every application.

Browsers have the added problem of me using ctrl-tab/ctrl-shift-tab to change between tabs a lot, but doing that non-blindly requires seeing where the tab is that you want. A hidden tab list would slow that down.

Agreed... I'm all for configurability, so making something like the tabs-on-top or your tabs-on-left options being a choice would be fine and dandy. But making either the only choice is a good way to get me to stop using Firefox.;-)

And to me the fact that you and he can have this little disagreement is one of the reasons I choose the Firefox over Chrome and Safari. Thanks to the easy additions of plugins and themes you can have it your way, he can have it his way, and I can have it my way. I just can't go back to the "one size fits all " UI of IE, Chrome, and Safari, as the one size fits all never fits me.

I just hope in FF4 it is as skinnable as FF3, so I don't get trapped in that bling bling nightmare or I may have to go back to one of the other Gecko based like Seamonkey or Kmeleon. It is bad enough that they screwed up dialup access in the 3.5.x branch, so now I have to keep the 3.0x and Seamonkey on my flash for my dialup customers, but if FF4 makes it too hard to change the look (and they stick with that "Chrome wannabe" look) I'll just have to go elsewhere, because frankly I hate the Chrome UI. With as much time as gets spent in a browser I want it MY way, not what some designers deems is best for me. Is that too much to ask, or is the future doomed to be dominated by browsers and OSes that have more bling than a 14 year old's cell phone?

I have Tree-Style Tab set up to be a static size. It does truncate the text, but mousing-over it shows the full text of a tab. And because it keeps track of parent/child tab relationships browsing is much easier. Collapsing/expanding tab groups is simple. No need for different-coloured groups, just make the group members children of a parent tab.

No. Tabs should be diagonal. The obvious advantages of this are so obvious that I don't need to mention them. It can be mathematically proven, too, that diagonal tabs are the most aesthetic and comfortable layout. If you weren't so educated stupid by evil educators, you would realize the power of the four-corner diagonal tab.

I can see how diagonal tabs might seem sensible, but have we become so mired in the UI design rut that we're unable to take the concept of tabs to its logical conclusion?

What is needed is for the tabs to be split out of the application and handled by a hardware peripheral. Something with tactile feedback when you activate tabs. Mozilla International have conducted research (I lost the link but you can Bing it) that shows that people with alternating yellow and black tabs are paid 12.5% more on average.

Indeed. Also, you can read more of the page title that way and avoid having 10+ tabs whose title starts with "Slashdot Com...".
For those who don't know, you can do this in Firefox using "Tree Style Tab" plug-in right now.

Yes, they should use as much horizontal space as they're given, but it's been proven that it's easier to read a narrow column of text than a wide one (google [google.com]). That's why newspapers use small columns.

If scrolling messes up your reading then perhaps you need to enable smooth scrolling or use the middle button to scroll slowly while you read.

You can have it as you like it! I can *right now* put the tabs on top, on the very bottom, on the right or left side, hide them and replace them by a dozen different ways of navigation, etc, etc, etc.

If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.(Second priority is good *defaults*. But never hard-code stuf

Why is this post marked as a Troll? It's a legitimate viewpoint and one I agree with. I'll take function over form every time. Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

Why is this post marked as a Troll? It's a legitimate viewpoint and one I agree with. I'll take function over form every time. Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

Perhaps mods took the view that Firefox was being called unstable and thus regarded the post as a troll?

That is exactly why we must meta moderate like crazy these days. Troll has a very strict explanation and believe or not, it means exactly same on slashdot.

These idiots really confuse Slashdot moderation with digg down&up while Slashdot does make a favor to them, overrated and underrated are exactly for that purpose.

There are unhappy people with every kind of browser&application out there and yes, in this age, a browser should be really fast, simple to use and stable having very good standards support. It is valid for every browser out there. It is not just Firefox who doesn't get people's concerns, I have heard first time that system's default browser can't download files. It is Safari for Snow Leopard. Way to go Apple... All of this for run a freaking in 64bit mode, hurry of release to show finger to MS. See Firefox loving moderator? Every browser these days are a bit disconnected from users actual needs and demands.

Except that Metamoderation these days doesn't present you with already-moderated posts. At least, not for me. All I get is a selection of 10 random posts and I have to decide if you, the average Slashdotter, would benefit. Nearly every post I'm given to "meta-moderate" us not previously moderated.

Meta moderation is not re-moderation of posts, it is used to hunt down the moderator abusers and people not understanding what moderation really is. You moderate the moderator in fact. So, just because poor guy says "Firefox crashes" and talks completely on topic about a different focus developers should have rather than cosmetic stuff and gets "dugg down" as troll, you will notice it and tell it is not fair.

I know it needs considerable time but that is why this and limited Karma prevented Slashdot from bec

I understand that meta moderation is moderating the moderator. My problem is that when I go to meta-moderate, none of the posts I'm given have been moderated. Go re-read the paragraph at the top of the meta-moderation page. It's changed in the last few months.

Crash? The only Firefox crashes I've seen in many many months were due to testing 64 bit Flash. If FF is crashing, I have to wonder about your operating system and/or hardware, but the primary culprit is probably buggy code in addon/plugin/codec/peripheral software.

I'm of the team that says we can have both. Especially if they factor in software ergonomics [wikipedia.org] into their design decisions. Most people don't realize it, but they like intuitive designs. Clearly, minimalism (an element of both form and function) is what is "in" for web-browser designs right now. We don't apparently need 8 menus with 20 submenus with 14 more sub-submenus, combined with 9 sections in the options menu, each with 15 subsections. We don't need 40 icons between the top of our web page and the bottom of our address bar.

So, you can have your function (a web browser with less junk crammed into it, and therefore a lower probability of things going wrong) and I can have my form (a nice looking, easy to use minimalist web browser). Everyone wins.

Agreed, I'd like to add one other thing. I have a buggy wireless card and the drives will lockup Vista x64, every couple of days/weeks or so. The weird part is that if I have FF open when it decides to crash, FF looses all setting. I mean everything even, everything get set to default, this all affects ad-ons as well.

Speaking of function, for god's sake don't combine the stop and refresh buttons. Or add a sufficient delay and animation when the button transitions from one action to the other so you dont accidently hit refresh when you intended to cancel the page load but it finished just before you clicked.

True. I love Firefox and have used it for years, but ever since I overclocked my desktop, even though every other application runs dead stable, Firefox crashes on average at least once a minute. It still runs fine on my laptop though....but the crashing on my OC'd system is infuriating.

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).

A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.

On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!

I'd agree with this, but I was actually more taken with the concept of the Combo Stop/Refresh/Go button which with 20:20 hindsight just made me think "Duh! Why wasn't it done like this from the start?" What might be better for the tabs though is "Version C"; put the tabs over the location bar, but below the standard title bar of the OS in question. Of course, we are talking about probably the most configurable browser of them all, so the best solution has to be "Version D" which is where the user gets to

Actually, IE7 was originally designed with the combo stop/refresh/go button, but they recieved a ot of feedback from users that stop and start/refresh are distinct functions and should not be combined. Eventually, Microsoft relented and made stop seperate.

Tabs on top makes a sense... because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are all part of the current tab, rather than the browser as a whole.

A cardinal rule of good user interface design is that controls are always in the same place. When the buttons are part of a tab, they may move around, for instance if the tab bar is set to hide if it contains one tab, or if the tab bar can expand to multiple lines, or if it can be placed horizontally or vertically.

In a GUI, "part of" means what visual grouping it belongs to and not the conceptual grouping it belongs to. If all the tabs contain the same controls, in the same positions, then these controls

Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate. I actually like the "throwing the title bar away and integrating tabs with window decorations" of Chrome - it gives a couple of cm more vertical space for the html render window. As does hiding the bookmarks bar, and status/download bars by default. Going back to a default Firefox layout now reminds me of those old 3D wireframe Elite style shootemups, and how they used to have huge blocks of static graphics at the top and bottom

In FireFox, enter fullscreen mode. Boom, 100% - a few pixels at the top, all for rendering the page content.Want to get to the tabs - hover your mouse over those few pixels.. voila, there's the tabs and address bar.

Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate

That's a fantastic point. I've got a 22" monitor at home and use a fairly high resolution laptop at work so I'm sure I'm out of touch with those with small monitors and netbooks. I still argue that disposing windows UI/UX standards is not the best way to accomplish this task, though.

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window.

The tabs don't replace the title bar functionality in Chrome. The title bar, including its minize, maximize, and close buttons, is in its normal place, and performs its normal function. It's slightly less tall than on a normal window, though.

Now go to Chrome, open enough tabs to fill up the row from left-to-right, and try to double-click the title bar.

For me, double-clicking an app's title bar (same function as "Restore Down" or "Maximize") is especially useful when I want to restore a maximized window so I can drag the app from my primary display to a secondary, or vice versa. I suspect many people do the same.

"and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window."

That's odd you mention that, considering the last two releases of Windows (Vista & 7) both have different interfaces (Vista with Aero, 7 with it's dock, er, task bar). I like how Google implemented its tabbed interface, but there is room for improvement. I find it fascinating that 10 years ago, IE *was* the internet! Now FF and Safari (along with WebKit dominating in the mobile space) have begun to push aside IE's presence

I completely agree, I like having a normal title bar. Then again, I still use the "classic theme" in Windows. I like the current UI as it is, and have even been a bit annoyed in some of the tweaks they've made over the past few releases.

I'd like to see these features as options or themes. Maybe even make an easy option to go into "support mode" which will provide a unified standard UI.

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).

A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.

On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!

With UI there's a trade-off between "flawed but we're used to it" and "innovative but so different nobody will catch the hang of it." QEWRTY sucks. Scientists can prove with lots of charts and numbers that there are better ways to layout a keyboard. Unfortunately, this is a change that won't likely happen. Everybody is used to QWERTY even if it sucks. Metric beats customary every time but I can't think in metric.

The problem with most of these changes is there really doesn't seem to be much of an improvement

Frankly, I think worrying about minor details like whether the tabs are above or below the taskbar sort of shows how far browsers have come. On the list of things I was worried about 5 or 10 years ago, it's near the bottom.

I hope they make integrating the search box in the URL box optional. One of the things I really like about FF is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to select specific search engines or sites. Of course with Ubiquity http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/ [mozilla.com] progressing nicely I may be in the minority.

I was half expecting to have to go on a tirade about the new look but it's actually pretty decent. Just looking at FF right now there's a lot of empty space that can be consolidated (mainly the file menu bar and the tabs bar area). The go/stop/reload consolidated into the path bar is a pretty good idea. Clears up a few buttons worth of space. And the file bar could really be hidden and opened up by right clicking the title bar icon in the upper left (where you'd normally just see 'restore, minimize, close,

Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background. And if it's only a little transparent (OS X), the menu can look like it got smudged with dirt. Are we expected to use only low-contrast, muted backgrounds?

If I wanted to see a partially obscured, blurry version of what's behind my browser, I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.

I like tabs on top because it makes them "pop" more--I save almost 0.1 second when hunting for an open tab at the top of the window compared to looking past the normal clutter to a lower tab bar! The lost title bar functionality doesn't affect me much since I always browse in a maximized window, but the mockup shows a thin strip above the tabs which should help those who don't.

The Windows 7 stuff doesn't excite me, because I am no longer a Windows user except here at work, where we will not be moving to 7

firefox will become translucent. god knows you cant browse the web unless its translucent (thats how they do it in minority report.) When will we see the genie effect added so the browser will finally pass the Acid exam with 100% and i can use web 2.0 the right way?

Why'd all the browser developers decide that this same model we have for browsing web pages is adequate? Considering how much time we, as a human race, are currently using the web browser, I would hope that we could make one that is a little better than this Netscape 26.0 shit we're stuck with. Apple, are you there? Can you please do for the browser what you've done for the phone? Google, we know you have like $n! dollars, can't you throw some more money at this problem? Chrome (which I am browsing from ATM) is pretty half-baked.

Shouldn't this thing read to me by now, standard? Shouldn't I have a better way to look at multiple pages than separate tabs and windows? Why does it all crash so much? Why must it be such an unelegant, awful thing to display information to from programming languages?

If Google or Apple but their tabs in a rotating circular drum surrounding the window, you can be certain that Open Source developers would follow swiftly behind. It's disappointing to see it confirmed that Open source will never, ever have the confidence to put forth its own designs, paradigms or new innovations directly in front of users unless a glitz and glamour company has broken the mould first. The worst part is how eagerly FOSS developers ape the latest trend. A little dignity would be a lot more digestible.

By contrast, Microsoft would simply wait to see what Apple did in their next revision before implementing what was kept.

To the topic at hand, Tabs on top are an atrocious development, unfit for human consumption. They are the product of people who spend too much of their time using flashy, UI paradigm-less monstrosities like Winamp skins, Flash site and those awful OSX floating widget things, not to mention that ridiculous top bar. Inclusing that was the worst decision GNOME has ever made. Most normal people on the other hand expect applications and button that stay within their window box, that don't warp or distort when your mouse draws near, and that don't look like they just had a full body wax job done. There was very little wrong with the 1997-era user interface.

I curse the Cult of Mac and what it has wrought on my UI's over the last 10 years. I'm hoping the Order of Google will not cast its baleful eye towards what little sanity remains in modern day GUIs.

I really hate the combo button. Safari introduced this and I started running into the following problems:

1. A page is loading slowly (slow site, busy computer, DNS lookup failure,...) and I go to click "stop", but the load finishes just before I click, the stop icon changed to a reload, and now I have to wait through it loading again.

2. A page is refreshing on a schedule. I decide I want to reload it sooner, so I go to click the reload button... just as it starts reloading, so now the automatic reload gets stopped.

Moving it to the end of the address box in the latest Safari is just an extra layer of manure on the sandwich.